Lauren Bacon, a Partner at Raised Eyebrow Web Studio, took a little time out of her busy day last week to tell me about her experience using The Extraordinaries iPhone application.
She has contributed to the Smithsonian Institution's and Library of Congress's image tagging projects on The Extraordinaries, and wants to contribute to the KaBOOM! map of places where kids can play, but hasn't yet. She also checked out Bibliothèque de Toulouse (they need help cataloging historic French photos) because she is bilingual.
Overall, her experiences with the Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress were positive because their needs were simple and straightforward. She did say that many of the images were already tagged so it would have been nice if the "skip" button was higher up in the window so that she could have skimmed more quickly through images that were already completed.
When I asked Lauren why she contributed to the Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress's projects, and not others, she said that she would contribute to more organizations' projects more often if:
- They were causes she was passionate about like arts education, gender quality, LGBT rights, and homelessness.
- They were based in Canada (she is Canadian).
- They had international impact. She sited MoveOn.org and Avaaz as organizations that do a good job making international users feel like they have something to contribute, even to local causes.
She also had some great ideas for how to encourage people to keep using the application after they download it.
- Send email reminders to users to keep the application at the top of their' minds, and to let them know when new projects are added.
- As more organizations get involved, create ways for people to search for projects by their areas of interest, and their expertise.
- Provide time estimates for projects.
- Allow people to email themselves a reminder to contribute to a project if they can't right at that moment.
- Facilitate users' sharing projects with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Let us know about your experience using The Extraordinaries in the comments or contact a member of the team.
Britt Bravo also blogs at Have Fun * Do Good, BlogHer.com, WE tv's WE Volunteer blog, and the Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship blog. She is a Big Vision Consultant.
Comments